About Me

My name is Sawyer Harris, and I am an undergraduate student majoring in Physics at North Carolina State University. I was selected for the 2014 URCA summer program to conduct research in computational astrophysics. For my research project, I am working with fellow NCSU student Emily Gipson and faculty mentor Dr. John Blondin.

Research

Spherical Accretion Shock Instability, or SASI, is a hydrodynamic instability that appears to play a key role in re-energizing the shock wave of a core-collapse supernova. While many numerical simulations have corroborated the existence of the SASI, few have considered the impact of rotation on its growth rate. In particular, the growth of the spiral SASI mode appears to be influenced by rotation in the same direction, but no numerical simulations have quantified the effect. Our project is to measure the growth rate of the spiral SASI modes as a function of the specific angular momentum of the progenitor star. We will be using time-dependent hydrodynamics code VH-1 in two and three dimensions to complete this project.